11/15/2010: Mini-RaceDay Results

Fringe Nation, I have great news of good cheer to be heard by all people.  We have mini-raceday results!  The following is an email that our illustrious Buggy Chairman Mackin sent out with how everything went down:

“Hey Fringe!

I would first like to congratulate the Mini Raceday women’s team for taking 1st place with a 2:10.18!!!!!! Great job everyone who helped out, whether you were running, driving, mechanicing, flagging, or just being there to support Fringe, thank you and congrats! Dan and I will be picking up our case of beer tonight.

I would also like to say something to the men’s team. We lost to SDC by .7 seconds. Our best time was 1:47.23, making the margin about .5% of our time. This very well (as Sam said) could have just been error in timing. But the point is we are fast and getting faster.

I believe that we are on the right track. If everyone has the right attitude and we work together, we can walk away with a triple crown again this year.

Thank you all for a great semester. Now get pumped for next!

FRBRF,
Mackin”

So once again, thank you to all drivers, pushers, and mechanics new and old, to the alumni who came out and supported, and to everyone else who contributed in whatever way they could, we couldn’t have done this without you guys. 

FRBRF

11/9/10: A recap of the weekend

I almost considered not doing a blogpost, since I feel like most people that read this were at my house on Saturday and is well aware of everything that went down.  But to those of you who couldn’t make it out here for the festivities, lemme give you a short recap.

Rolls were cancelled both days, Saturday because there was snow in the forecast, and Sunday because:

a.  There were three cars parked on the course, one of which was booted

b.  Our rent-a-cops never showed up

c.  Half the hay bales went missing.  (As a corollary, turns out CIA actually put the hay bales away instead of the PiKA pledges)

So of course, with a distinct lack of buggy for the weekend, we did that other thing that Fringe does best: BBQ.  It was great to see all the alumni that showed up, it was a wonderful opportunity for all new and old Fringers to get to know each other before Carnival when introductions are… difficult to manage.  For an idea of how Saturday’s BBQ went, check the new T-Shirt design I posted in the private Fringe Facebook group.

Now for some sobering news.  The new Fringe tabletop, hand-painted by Mikey V and Molly Hall has been stolen.  If you never saw this beautiful blue and orange piece of art in person, I believe pictures of it are on Facebook somewhere.  We lean it up against the side of the house when not in use, and someone just came up and grabbed it.  So a call to action to the Fringe Nation.  If you go to a house and see that tabletop, immediately call one of the exec members, preferably me, Adam, or Mikey V, and we will roll up with the rest of Fringe and probably most of the rugby team and take back what is ours.

This message brought to you by Josh Hixson

FRBRF

11/1/10: What’s been going on

So much, so much.  Let’s keep it brief and break it down

Booth: Planning has begun, led by our booth chairs Ying Lin, Ben Finch, and Molly Hall.  The Booth theme this year is “When I was your age…” and we’re doing a Lego booth.  Gonna be awesome

Buggy: Rolls went off without a hitch on Saturday.  We were a little short handed, but it is the Fall, it happens.  It was also colder than sin.  But we’re looking good for mini raceday which is in two weeks.  Work has begun on NBXI

IM Sports: Last week we won all three of our games with overwhelming force.  Well… the other team didn’t show up for volleyball, so we crushed them by default.  We beat CIA in CoRec soccer 9-5 and our Men’s team won their game 7-4.  Schedule of games this week:  Volleyball tonight @8, CoRec soccer tomorrow @7, Men’s soccer Thursday @9

Social: Most importantly, HOMECOMING WEEKEND IS NEXT WEEKEND!!!  We’re looking forward to all the alumni coming back.  Saturday is the big day for us, Rolls in the morning, breakfast after Rolls in Squirrel Hill, Chili cookoff in the Gym, Fringe BBQ at the house starting around 3,  and finally a get together at said house at 10 (or you could just not leave).

Also, the orders for the “freaking ridiculous in generally everything” shirt reprint will be sent to the printers on Wednesday, expect the shirts before Thanksgiving break.  So that means everyone should pay before they leave.

FRBRF

10/25/10: The Last Week in Fringe

This past week has been a very busy week for Fringe in one main area – Intramural Sports.  We had three different games going on: CoRec Soccer, CoRec Volleyball, and Men’s Soccer.  Since I (this is Josh btw) played in all three games, I think I can give an accurate account of each.

CoRec Soccer:  This game was an absolute slaughter, with Fringe coming out on top 7-2.  We were playing what looked like a bunch of Malaysian grad students, and we just ran all over them.  I scored 5 and Mike Velez and Justin Barsano each scored 1.  It’s safe to say if the other CoRec teams are anything like that, we got a championship in the bag. 

CoRec Volleyball: It was our last game of the season against our arch-Half Price-rivals, CIA.  We had to start the game with 4 people since both myself and Justin showed up late (I had class, dunno bout him).  Even still, we pretty much wiped the floor with them.  Much love to Julia Kramkova for still coming out to volleyball games .  Unfortunately that might have been our first win of the season, every other game we won points-wise we had to forfeit for one reason or another. 

Men’s Soccer:  This was an amazing game.  We were down 1-0 from the outset after they got a very quick goal.  But led by Andrew Finlayson, we rallied back to tie it up 3-3.  It was a very physical game, one defender must have though I was cute because he seemed to try to hug me every time the ball came near me.  I threw him to the floor.  Finny also showed the other team that they had not yet earned the right to stand up on our field.  Unfortunately, at the last second, despite our best efforts, and aided by some HORRIBLE, ATROCIOUS, ABOMINABLE reffing, the other team scored and one 4-3.  Goals on our side went to me, Finny, and Mikey V, one a piece.

I would put up a rolls report from the weekend, but I spent all of Saturday flagging transition and slept through Sunday (whoops), but by all accounts nothing really happened of interest for us, go to cmubuggy.org and read Sam’s report if you wanna know what went down.

I want to give a shout out to Sarah Schipul Swift for giving us our first official donation of the year.  Further on the fundraising front, we’ve ventured into a very profitable donut trade.  How many donuts do we need to sell for new wheels?

More news to come, stay tuned my Frinjas

FRBRF

10/16/10: Rolls Report

Did you miss rolls this morning?  Probably, we didn’t have that many out there.  Here’s a little recap of the morning’s events.

It was beautiful October morning as three of our buggies, Bedlam, Borealis, and Blizzard, made their way to Tech St. to be put in the very capable hands of their drivers, Becky Peterkin, Dana Weinstein, and Jenn Coloma, respectively.  Borealis was newly painted, properly this time, with the color changer and was look amazing.  Unfortunately, on the first run of the morning, tragedy struck when Borealis decided to stop turning and shunted straight into the chute bales.  Blizzard ended up flying through the chute but luckily avoiding Borealis due to some confusion with the transition and chute flags.  Thankfully, both Dana and Borealis escaped the situation with no serious injury or damage and both will be back in rolling shape in no time.

We managed to get in two more rolls after the long delay.  Bedlam (driven by Becky) absolutely flew down the freeroll, after some hill 2 shoves by Rob Wojno that have been referred to as “terrifying” and “massive and beastly” by spectators.  One of our new drivers, Jenn, steered Blizzard down the freeroll faster than ever before for her, thanks to some not as massive hill 2 shoves by Mike Velez.  The back hill pushers were all looking strong, most were freshmen or new Fringe members.  Someone did forget to get down to Hill 3 to push Blizzard on the last roll.  Luckily Josh Hixson was able to jump out of the follow truck to push it up the hill until the actual pusher, Steve McQuaid, showed up.  There were only 6 orgs rolling, so it’s understandable with the very short breaks between rolls that the pushers weren’t able to get to their hills in time.

Regrettably, we were not able to get too many pictures, though some will be posted on cmubuggy.org.

In terms of the other teams, Pika crashed, AEPi crashed, and SigEp crashed.  CIA and Spirit didn’t.  Last week AEPi brought their buggy Zephyrus out sporting a wooden pushbar comprised by a T made my some 2 by 4′s.  This week they replaced the 2 by 4 handle with a wooden dowel and painted it all black.

That’s all from today’s session, for more about what the other teams did, read Sam Swift’s report at cmubuggy.org.  There are no rolls tomorrow, so stay tuned to here how next weekend turns out.

FRBRF

10/12/10: Wait, we’re doing what now?

BOOTH!!!!!! 

yessir I know you all heard we weren’t doing booth this year, then you might have heard we’re doing a blitz booth, but honest to goodness everybody, WE ARE DOING A REAL BOOTH!!!!  Gotta give a shoutout to our new Booth Chairs, Ben Finch and Ying Lin, they’re gonna plan for us one badass booth.  Let’s keep our legacy of excellent booths going.

What else are we doing?  Painting Borealis, that’s what.  When we originally tried to paint her with the color changing paint, there were some… problems.  That resulted in the kind of dull, patchy, yet still pretty sweet paintjob she’s been sporting the last few weeks.  But we want her to shine and sparkle, so we took that off and started over.  If all goes according to plan, she will be beautifully shiny and color-change-y for rolls this Saturday.

Few other random thoughts.  We’re in the planning stages of an alumni BBQ during Homecoming Weekend.  Current Fringers don’t really have to do anything, but alumni should look for an email from Josh or Julia in the next week or so about it.  Tonight (Tuesday) is our random game in Doherty Hall.  Meet out there at 11pm, who knows what’s gonna happen from there.  Tomorrow night is IM Volleyball, UC Gym at 8pm.   There was some comfusion last week (basically Josh lied about the time in the email), but we are 100% it is actually at 8pm this week.  So come out and play, we need at least 3 females to show up for the game to count.  And of course we have Half Price tomorrow night.  Contact Mike or Adam if you plan on going.

FRBRF

10/11/10: New Fringe Blog

This is the new Fringe blog.  All posts will be linked to fringe.org under the news tab.  News will be posted regularly and will fill everyone in on the latest Fringe happenings (rolls reports, events, etc)